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News and Top Stories

The New iPhone, iOS 6, iTunes, and Even More iThings
Apple released a bunch of new things this week. We go over it all quickly in the show, and if you want more information you can check our full Apple coverage. Also, if you want to upgrade to iOS 6 a week early, go get it.

One million Apple UDIDs (Universal Device IDs) were released to the public today, along with…
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Fox Offering $15 Movie Downloads Prior to Blu-ray Release
Fox is jumping on the movie streaming bandwagon, releasing popular movies before they come out on Blu-ray. They're even going to start working with Netflix and other streaming services to make films available earlier. Yep, there will be DRM, but this is a great start!

How to Get Off the Upgrade Treadmill
At the Kindle launch last week, Jeff Bezos mentioned how he and Amazon don't want everyone on the "upgrade treadmill." That's to say that we upgrade too much, and we don't need to be replacing our hardware like its toilet paper. Us tech geeks love the next best thing, however, so it's hard to let go of these upgrades. Thorin offers some suggestions.

Every year hardware manufacturers release new iterations of their products. From Apple to Samsung…
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Get "Pro" Features on Your Canon Point-and-Shoot with CHDK
Whitson hacked his Canon point-and-shoot camera this week by installing CHDK, a custom firmware that offers tons of awesome features. It only took him about 10 minutes, too. It's a great way to add more to your cheap camera with little effort and no cost.

You don't need to spend thousands of dollars on a camera just for features like motion…
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Moving On When A Service You Love Shuts Down
Alan tries out lots of web services, gets hooked, and then many of them shut down. He decided he wanted to find out better ways to cope with this problem and did. Here's what he suggests.

PayPal is generally seen as the definitive way to pay people online, but it's not necessarily…
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Questions and Answers

Each week we answer five questions from readers and listeners. Here's what we tackled this week.

How can I retroactively run Gmail's spam filter on my email archive?
Darren transferred his email archive to Gmail via Thunderbird. There was a lot of spam email in it. Gmail didn't mark any of it as spam. Darren found this annoying. While we couldn't find any way to actually retroactively run spam filters, I recently transfered my archive by using Gmail's import feature and the SPAM filter ran on all the messages. It didn't catch EVERY spam message, but it found thousands. To import this way, just go into Gmail's settings and choose "Accounts." From there you can import your old account in the "Check mail from other accounts (using POP3)" section. This will import your archived mail and apply the spam filters.

I drink 18 cups of coffee per day. How can I kick my caffeine habit?
With patience and willpower. Readers have offered some suggestions, like using caffeine supplements and slowly replacing caffeinated cups with decaf. Basically, you need some sort of emotional reaction to the problem so you're motivated to actually stop the problem. From there you just really have to buckle down, understand that your life is going to be tough for a month or two, and slowly ween yourself off caffeine. We're not doctors or even life coaches, but we've broken bad habits many times and that's the common thread: you have to really want to stop and accept that it's going to be hard.

How do I gift a DD-WRT router to a normal person without overloading their brains?
DD-WRT isn't something the average person is going to be able to jump into easily no matter what you do to it.

Downloads of the Week

Each week we talk about our favorite downloads. Here are our picks for this week.

Social Fixer (Firefox/Chrome/Opera/Every Browser)
We've talked about Social Fixer on the podcast before: it's an extension for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari that fixes tons of Facebook annoyances, adds new features, and overall just makes Facebook better. If you haven't tried it out, though, we found a great new use for it: filtering out annoying, unintelligent, political posts from your Facebook friends. All it takes is a few simple filters to make it happen, and it's well worth the installation of a new extension.

Retinizer (OS X)
The new MacBook Pro with a retina display are great to look at, but not every piece of software has been updated to support the higher resolution. Retinizer is an app that allows you to force higher resolutions in apps where it's possible.

Sleep Time Alarm Clock (Android and iOS)
Did you wake up this morning feeling awful, even though you got plenty of sleep the night before? You may have woken at the deep end of your sleep schedule. Sleep Time Alarm Clock is a free app for Android that will make sure that doesn't happen again.

YouTube (iOS)
The new YouTube app for the iPhone and iPod Touch offers thousands of new VEVO music videos that were previously desktop only, lets you search by voice, and features an overhauled UI that makes browsing playlists and favorites easier.

How Do I Submit a Question?

Please keep your questions as brief as possible. This means about 3-5 sentences for emails and 30-60 seconds for calls and videos. Your questions can be specific, but broader questions are generally better because they'll apply to more people. For example, "how can I breathe new life into my old PDA?" is much better than "what can I do with an old HP iPAQ 210?" Either way, we look forward to hearing from you!